Gutenberg is the codename for the new WordPress editor. It’s fast, flexible, and opens up a new world of possibilities for writing posts.

It’s currently beta software, which means it’s being tested by thousands of different people all over the world, from big news organisations, to small businesses, to professional and personal bloggers.

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18.6 million active installations
22.2 million posts written*
164 thousand written yesterday*

 * The post statistics on this page are obtained from WordPress.com sites and sites running Jetpack — which report whether Gutenberg was used to author the post. The post statistics only include posts created since late August 2018. The actual number is higher.

A Few Statistics Of Note

The top nine blocks in usage across WordPress.com and sites running Jetpack are:

  1. Paragraph
  2. Image
  3. Heading
  4. List
  5. Gallery (generally tied with HTML)
  6. HTML (generally tied with Gallery)
  7. YouTube embed
  8. Quote
  9. Separator
Piechart showing the information on the top 8 Gutenberg blocks in relative order. Of interest is the fact that 60% of blocks are main body text but 20% of the page corresponds to image information (via the Image and Gallery blocks).

Of note is that web pages these days are, on the average, filled with images — via the Image block and the Gallery block — in a significant ratio of roughly 1 or more images per every three paragraph blocks.

The relative proportion of Gutenberg blocks indicates an attempt by the author to minimize the amount of writing they need to do by including:

  1. Lots of lists.
  2. Lots of header text.
  3. Lots of images and galleries.
  4. Lots of quotations (that don’t need to be written by themselves).
  5. Lots of separators to improve legibility.

Also of note is that the dominant embed type by far is the YouTube block. The next closest embed type is Twitter with YouTube blocks outnumbering Twitter blocks by well over 10:1.